China has emerged as the world’s largest producer of generative AI patents, but is struggling to turn many of its ideas into action thanks to U.S. export controls and long-standing struggles with its domestic innovation culture.
In July, the UN intellectual property agency reported that China has registered more than 38,000 generative AI patents in the last decade, more than all other countries combined.
Chinese companies and institutions are ranked among the top 10 global patent holders, including Tencent, Ping An Insurance, Baidu and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to data from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
Four US companies are in the top 10, but Silicon Valley and US research institutions registered just 6,276 in the same period from 2014-2023. South Korea, in third place, presented 4,155 inventions, followed by 3,409 from Japan and 1,350 from India, according to WIPO data.
Despite this upheaval, however, China still lags behind the US in terms of impact because the high number of patents only tells part of the story, according to Van Anh Le, assistant professor of intellectual property law at Durham University in the United States. United States. Kingdom.
“The large number of patents filed or granted is often mistakenly seen as a direct indicator of innovation. A high volume of patents can be driven by factors unrelated to pioneering innovation, such as strategic registrations, divergent national policies or even non-innovative reasons,” said Le. Patents are also designed to protect innovation, but do not necessarily guarantee its commercial success, she added.
Despite the lower number of patents overall, US developers have a clear lead. Stanford University’s 2024 AI Index named the US as the undisputed home of the “most notable AI models” to date, producing 61, compared to the European Union’s 21 and China’s 15.
The latest AI boom began with Google’s 2017 development of the groundbreaking “transformer” – the neural network architecture that underpins generative AI, including its large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 was another breakthrough – dubbed the “iPhone moment” for generative AI by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang because that was when the problem entered popular consciousness.
Although ChatGPT has been followed by dozens of competitors, including Baidu’s ERNIE bot in China, none appear to have made the same impact.
Most national patents
Competing with Silicon Valley’s capabilities and resources has always been a challenge, but it has become even more challenging since 2021, when the US began imposing export controls on key technologies such as the NVIDIA A100 chip, which helped drive the most recent AI boom.
“Although China has registered the most generative AI patents in the world, far more than the US, many of these Chinese patents have not and could not be translated into forces to help bring [about] the rise of LLMs and other fundamental AI models,” said Alex He, senior fellow at the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), a Canadian think tank.
“This is because China did not have the massive computing power required, billions and trillions of high-quality data parameters for training large models, which prevented China from following the ChatGPT-like model technology route that OpenAI started ,” he told Al Jazeera.
Companies such as Intel and Nvidia have strived to make chips that comply with US regulations for the Chinese market, but Chinese companies themselves are turning to Huawei’s locally manufactured Ascend series of chips, according to a June report from the company. based in the USA. National Bureau of Asian Research.
Meanwhile, the Chinese AI industry is also looking inward and focusing more on the domestic market. He estimated that the country has registered just 2,926 overseas patents, based on China’s traditionally low rate for overseas applications.
He suggested that many of China’s top GenAI developers, such as Tencent, Ping An Insurance, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance, are primarily focused on the domestic market as part of their overall business strategy. Companies that register patents abroad, on the other hand, are already present there, such as Huawei, ZTE and Vivo.
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Many of China’s generative AI patents were also developed for internal use, such as improving a company’s business operations or existing applications.
He said only Baidu, best known abroad for its search engine, has been focusing on more innovative AI research and development, but at present, it still lacks advanced AI chips to catch up, He said.
Generative AI patents, led by China’s private tech sector, are “better than most,” according to He, and driven by “really innovative industrial research” to catch up or profit on demand, but he says they also there is a long-standing problem of rewarding quantity over quality.
Promoters and inventors may be incentivized to file patents to secure government subsidies, secure individual promotions or acquire certification for their company as a “national high-tech company,” said Le de Durham, rather than to protect a true innovation.
“The Chinese government sees itself as something akin to a large-scale start-up incubator, thinking along the lines of a state-owned equivalent of a ‘Y Combinator’ – only with an outsized weight and a much longer-term investment horizon ,” said Le, referring to the American startup accelerator that has helped launch thousands of companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Dropbox, Instacart and Stripe.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
